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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476270">Drabble</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitcat300/pseuds/Kitcat300'>Kitcat300</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Getting rid of the Future's [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Timeless (TV 2016)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Gen, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 07:13:46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,381</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476270</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitcat300/pseuds/Kitcat300</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Garcia Flynn drinks himself into a realisation about Future Lucy and the journal.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Garcia Flynn &amp; Lucy Preston, Garcia Flynn/Lucy Preston</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Getting rid of the Future's [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088423</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Drabble</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Had it started in Sao Paulo, in the dive selling bootleg liquor with impunity?  Or was it two weeks earlier with cough like shots and enough blood to drown in?  Maybe it was the first time he came across the name Rittenhouse and so carelessly recorded it for anyone to find?</p><p>Whichever it was, Garcia Flynn was too drunk to know or care.  What he knew without thought was it all revolved around one woman. </p><p>“You won’t get your family back.”  But she’d given him the keys to a time machine so surely???</p><p>“You’ll be the greatest hero of them all.”  Not if recent history was anything to go by.</p><p>“You’ll think you’ve lost yourself.”  Now that one he could get behind.</p><p>And a journal.  A bloody journal.  A map? A key? Paper soaked in gasoline, ready to burn down history?</p><p>It read like a stream of consciousness but his first? - last? - journey in the Mothership showed it for something more.  Yes, there’d been facts relevant to Rittenhouse people, and to meeting the Time Team - please! - but now, with a hole in his shoulder and more alcohol in his veins than anything else, it began to look more like a path to deliberate destruction.</p><p>Lucy Preston. Two different women?  One woman who would turn into the other?  The one he’d met hours and nearly a century ago was very different to the one who’d appeared in the bar two years ago.<br/>
At the time he’d been drowning and she’s handed him a lifeline.  Now he wasn’t so sure.  More whiskey might help.  Might not.  At this point it was all the same.  It numbed the pain anyway.</p><p>The woman in front of the flames had been scared, awed, bewildered, fragile, beguiling.  And fed a pack of lies, but that was by-the-by.  When he’d shown her the journal he’d seen it on her face.  This was impossible, unthinkable and yet on some level she’d wondered.  The germ of a doubt had taken hold as she’d searched his face and he’d hoped... Well, who was he to hope? That she’d see him?  The real him?  That this beautiful creature would allow that doubt to fester and grow until what?  Until she began to work with him?  Wanted to work with him?  Until they became friends?  Something more?</p><p>Sao Paulo Lucy hadn’t been anything more to him.  Couldn’t have been anything more to him and said what she’d said.  The journal implied, well it implied a lot.  It never actually said anything directly.  On the first twenty - was it twenty? - read throughs, he’d begun to fill in the missing pieces, fix the puzzle that was only half made.   Now, one mission down, he wasn’t so sure he’d made the right picture after all.</p><p>Garcia Flynn had been a clever man.  That was how he’d found the name that had triggered everything.  He hadn’t been clever enough, strong enough, brave enough, fast enough, not nearly enough to save his beautiful girls. And there wasn’t nearly enough alcohol in the hideout to continue with this line of thought.  There were, however a team of men in the other room who’d be able to hear him weep if he kept going like this.</p><p>No.  He was thinking about Lucy.  Not Present Lucy, with her pretty eyes who’d pulled at something almost forgotten in him. Future Lucy.  And there he was missing something.  Something he should have understood earlier.  Something just out of his grasp.</p><p>Oddly, the alcohol helped to bring the night she’d appeared to him into clearer focus.  She’d looked good.  Not just attractive, both versions of her were that, but good.  Healthy.  Well rested.  Preternaturally calm, considering.  Not a soldier, not someone recently recovering from a fight, but someone who’d been living a normal life.  </p><p>How?</p><p>If what the journal said was true they’d been fighting Rittenhouse for years, bouncing from time to time, reacting to any attempt to change history.</p><p>The final entry had them almost losing the war.  Lucy was hurt.  At the time of writing she hadn’t known how she was going to find the strength to stand up let alone continue the fight.  That wasn’t the Lucy he met.  </p><p>Why?</p><p>In the bar Lucy hadn’t been alone.  He’d not paid them any attention at the time but having seen Wyatt and Rufus up close now he knew they’d been with her.  If the journal was to be believed then at some point Lucy and Wyatt would have shared a brief, painful liaison.  Much of the inner thought process in the journal was dedicated to Lucy overcoming that incident and trying to talk herself back into some semblance of a friendship with the soldier.</p><p>It was clear to Flynn now, albeit with the aide of drink, that Future Lucy had not just been working with her former beau. Wyatt had been possessive of her.  Proprietary.  The journal had no entries of them reaching this place.  Ergo the journal was incomplete.  Deliberately?</p><p>Future Flynn had not come to Sao Paulo.  Wouldn’t he have been the most able to convince himself of the need for this course of action?  Where had he been?  The notes on time travel Bruhl had given him implied that travelling within his own timeline was impossible.  But he’d met Lucy, seen the team.  So... Not impossible.  Which left what?  He didn’t think it was necessary?  Unlikely.  He couldn’t be bothered?  No. He was not with the team anymore?  But the journal was almost explicit in its notations of Flynn’s devotion to Lucy so surely he wouldn’t just have left?  Unless he hadn’t wanted to leave.  Unless he was … dead?</p><p>If he was dead though, the team had a time machine.  They’d have gone back to save him.  Right?  After all, he was the one person, the only person, in the team Lucy had trusted with her inner most thoughts.  No way could they have been as close as those pages implied and then she just left him to die.  Unless.  Well unless the journal wasn’t as true as it made itself out to be.  </p><p>Was something rotten in the state of Denmark?</p><p>Sloppily pouring the last of the bottle into a glass that was definitely shrinking Flynn allowed his thought to spiral unchecked.  A burning blimp.  Lincoln must die.  He would shoot the president?  Had shot?  Who knew?  A beautiful, broken Lucy lying on the floor.  A brother risen from the dead.  A cold concrete bunker.  Midnight vodka conversations. Country roads.  Blues singers.</p><p>Blues.</p><p>Future Lucy had not been blue.  Brittle, maybe, but not unhappy.  She had the look of a woman used to smiling.  How could she smile at him if she’d left him to die?  What kind of woman was this future vision?  </p><p>Maybe it was the alcohol.  Maybe he was feeding his paranoia.  But she’d smiled at him even though with every heartbeat he became more convinced his future self was gone.  Turned to dust.  And for what?  Future Lucy’s happy ever after?  Was she worth it?  A woman who’d come to him at his weakest and told him nothing he wanted or needed would happen but had somehow managed to get what she wanted?  What was this journal?  Where was it supposed to lead?</p><p>The journal opened a time loop.  The woman who had handed him the book wanted to continue on her current path so she was using it to make sure the same events happened again.  How many times had they done this dance?  How many times had this future version of Lucy Preston set him up to die?</p><p>No.  Not this time.  No chance.  Not this version of Garcia Flynn.  This Flynn was the master of his own fate, not a puppet to have his strings pulled for the gain of others.</p><p>Bone deep, he knew the Lucy Preston in his timeline was not that woman.  No-one was that good an actress. So before he set foot in the Mothership again he was going to speak to her.  They were going to have an honest conversation and work this out.</p><p>This Flynn was no one’s sacrificial lamb.</p><p>And just as soon as he woke up from passing out he was going to make a brand new entry for Lucy to write about.</p>
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